UN climate forum “a propagandistic exercise” says Czech President Vaclav Klaus [updated]

When you get the largest gathering of the world’s political leaders in all history, what are the odds of hearing anything sensible? Czech President Vaclav Klaus has just bucked those odds.

Speaking to the collection of international frauds gathered at the home of international fraudulence, the UN, Professor Václav Klaus used his time at the podium [in the words of Luboš Motl]

“to teach his students, other politicians, something about the society, economics, politics, and their interactions with science, taking the global warming hoax as the main example. But most of them are bad students so they were far too distracted by thoughts of climate porn so they didn't learn almost anything.”

As Klaus told his audience of politicians, as they are heading further and further towards “consensus” on global warming, scientists are heading in the other direction.

"It was sad and it was frustrating," said Klaus, one of the world's most vocal skeptics on the topic of global warming. "It's a propagandistic exercise where 13-year-old girls from some far-away country perform a pre-rehearsed poem," he said. "It's simply not dignified."

UPDATE: Before the beanfest Klaus gave an interview to the Washington Times, in which he

    “repeated his view that global warming was ‘humbug’ and ‘nonsense.’
    “He spoke a day before attending a summit in New York about climate change, which most other nations and politicians view as a significant threat to the environment and human and animal life.
    “’This is a undefendable position,’ Mr. Klaus said. "I am convinced of the nonsense of global warming’.”

Earlier in the week he spoke at the National Press Club, where he told America’s political journalists”

"The current [economic] crisis has not been caused by capitalism and definitely not by too much capitalism. It was caused by the lack of capitalism, by suppressing its normal functioning, by introduction of policies that are not compatible with capitalism, of policies that undermine it. In a standard economic terminology, we witness a government failure, not a market failure as some politicians and their fellow-travellers in the media and academia keep telling us."

And he delivered these two gems:

"Markets cannot be constructed they must evolve."

"Communism wasn't defeated...it melted down."

He speaks at the Cato Institute this morning.  Oh to be a fly on that wall.

Obama’s “Road to Hell” mistranslated, says Czech blogger [updated]

Reports in Google News and The New York Times that Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek described the ObamaMessiah’s “rescue” plan as a “road to hell,” in a speech to the Strasbourg parliament, are inaccurate, says Czech blogger and Free Radical writer Luboš Motl:

    If you're an open-minded reader who is actually interested in reality, you should know that Mr Topolánek probably didn't say that the policies were a "road to hell." I guess that at least in the private context, he may have said that the combination of the stimuli and the protectionist & "Buy American" policies (and their declared "permanency"!) repeat the mistakes of the 1930s and are a "road to the asshole" ("cesta do prdele") or "a way to the crapper" ("cesta do hajzlu"). And he's damn right! :-)
    This is what I could predict based on my extended linguistic knowledge of the prime minister's opinions and colorful vocabulary. :-) Incidentally, Barroso's EU Commission seems to agree with Topolánek. . .

Luboš has a video clip of the comments at his site (along with the “mistranslation”). He also puts into context the kerfuffle over the “no confidence” crisis in the Czech parliament that Obama friendly media are talking up.

    Today, the foreign media have written a lot about the "political crisis" in the Czech Republic. Well, there's no "crisis."
    The government just failed in a no-confidence vote which is a standard … situation described in the constitution. The constitution is being followed literally and [President Václav Klaus], seems pretty happy about the no-confidence vote. . .
    [Klaus]will accept Topolánek's resignation tomorrow and he will have the right and the pleasure to choose a new prime minister who will try to pass another confidence vote in the Parliament. That's a standard sequence of events that is not surprising in our political system in any sense. Also, it is completely unrelated to the current global economic havoc, despite loads of stupid or downright dishonest journalists who suggest otherwise . . .

And that’s the memo direct from the Czech Republic, without the deluded intermediary of the NY Times.

UPDATE:  Oops.  Says Luboš in clarification:

“No! I was joking about the slang language. That's what our PM uses in different contexts but in the EU speech, he surely said "hell". Sorry to disappoint you by his being very diplomatic and moderate in this case.”

Czech President says ‘no’ to global warming sacrifices

Speaking in New York at the Heartland Institute’s Second International Conference on Climate Change, at Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who currently holds the EuroPresidency, says,

    “The questions which need to be answered [about the science and the politics of global warming] are serious and non-trivial. Should we make radical decisions now? Should we tax today's generations to benefit future generations? Should we be generously altruistic? Should we give preference to future generations and not to the people living in undeveloped countries today? My answer is no." 

Read his whole speech here [pdf], and Professor Bob Carter’s account of the conference so far here.

Snarling warmist hatred - updated

The Greens's website links to a snarling interview of Great Global Warming Swindle maker Martin Durkin conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Tony Jones after the Swindle screened in Australia.  [Lubos has the same links, and an infinitely superior commentary.]

Just so you know, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is a government TV station.  Just so you know, this is the same Australian Broadcasting Corporation that has on its website a game for kids that tells them they deserve to die if they use too "more than their fair share of the earth's resources": Planet Slayer's Greenhouse Calculator. 

Bear in mind that this is a game for children.  Imagine a young seven-year-old (my own mental age) clicking on the government website and finding out that (as in my case) they should have died at the ripe old age of five.  As  Diana says at Noodle Food, this is "Pure Environmentalist Evil."   On this same theme is Flibber:

    I know people like to cut environmentalists some slack and say that not everyone who considers themselves an environmentalist is a dirty hippie like Greena who wants people to live in the dirt and mud.  But that's where it always goes...
    You nice people who think, "Well, I do think litter is bad and it's not difficult to recycle, so why not?" you're keeping company with people who really do consider human beings pests who should just die out.  And slowly, it's moving from "Don't Litter" to asking children to find out when they should just die to keep from spoiling the earth.
    These people aren't joking.  They do not have anyone's best interests at heart.  They want you to die so the weeds can get on with taking over your garden.

They really aren't joking.  As Patrick Moore points out in 'Swindle,' hardcore environmentalists really do think human beings are pests -- and the level of 'contamination' of the environmental movement by misanthropy is certainly less than one part in ten.  Ethically, they're anti-human.  Politically, they're  anti-freedom.  Just look at the proposal being seriously considered in Britain to bring in rationing to limit your travel, your food and your household energy use -in other words, your entire daily life.  The "ultimate green fantasy"!  And as Bob points out, "note that this nightmarish scheme is being advanced not by the British far left, but by the Tories."

This is serious.  They really do want a Blue Planet in Green Shackles, as Czech President Vaclav Klaus titles his latest book, which has just been translated into English  (Full title: Blue Planet in Green Shackles - What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?).  Said Klaus at the book's launch, he is no skeptic - with him "the word "skeptic" is an understatement" -- and he's all ready to debate Al Gore, although skeptical of Big Al ever showing up.

    Klaus, an economist, said he opposed the "climate alarmism" perpetuated by environmentalism trying to impose their ideals, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.
    "Like their (communist) predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality," he said.
    "In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat - this time, in the name of the planet," he added.
    Klaus said a free market should be used to address environmental concerns and said he opposed as unrealistic regulations or greenhouse gas capping systems designed to reduce the impact of climate change.
    "It could be even true that we are now at a stage where mere facts, reason and truths are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda," he said.

I suspect Klaus would enjoy Carbon Belch Day -- June 12 -- when you can save the planet one Belch at a time.  Belch Day organisers want people "to waste as much energy as possible on June 12 by hosting a barbecue, going for a drive, watching television, leaving a few lights on, or even smoking a few cigars.  The point: the group wants to help [people] break free from the 'carbon footprint guilt' being imposed by Climate Alarmists."

Blue Planet in Green Shackles by Vaclav Klaus Read more about this book...

UPDATE 1:  By the way, May 2008 was NZ's coldest May since 1992.  Just thought you'd like to know.  I wonder how NIWA's David Wratt felt when he released the figures.  [Hat tip Mulholland Drive.]

UPDATE 2: New blogger Jeff Perren (add him to your sidebar) adds another instance to the 'Blue Planet in Green Shackles' file:  America's so called Climate Security Bill -- "one of the biggest efforts to date to chain industrial civilization since its birth":

    Individuals, which is what the people who work for and invest in businesses are, have a right to use the Earth for their own benefit. Nothing in what they're doing is having nor will have the severe impact on the climate that the bill's advocates claim make it necessary.
    No one's health or well-being is going to be significantly harmed by producing CO2 at projected levels over the next 100 years. Even if it did, contra science, this bill will not do anything to change that. It will only further the takeover of the economy by the new Communists — the Greens and their partners-in-crime in Congress.

What if?

ONE OF THE FASCINATING things to do when studying history is to speculate about "What if?" questions.

Studying history with Scott Powell offers ample opportunity to speculate.  Scott's current course on the Middle East alone (which you can still join in) offers ample opportunity for speculation.

• What if Britain hadn't nearly bankrupted itself in two centuries of Middle Eastern military adventures in a bid to protect its Indian colony?  What shape would the Middle East's maps be in today if Britain's flawed mercantilist thinking hadn't entangled it in so many misadventures in which it had no need to participate?
• What if Harry Truman hadn't entangled America in the Middle East in a flawed bid to restrain communism?  What use would the bankrupt Soviet Union have been able to make of the Mid-East even if Truman had left the sphere alone? (And what threat would it have been if Franklin Roosevelt and Klaus Fuchs hadn't both in their own way helped to arm the Soviets?)
• What if Dwight Eisenhower hadn't pulled the pin on Britain, France and Israel's recovery of the Suez Canal after Nasser's nationalisation of it?  Would Eisenhower's support for the already successful recovery have helped to nip the incipient Mid-Eastern nationalism in the bud?
• What if Britain and the US hadn't stood back when the oil fields and refineries owned, established and built up by British and American investors were nationalised by tribal leaders and would be nationalist heroes?  Would this have sent a signal to all potential plundererers of American and British property that property rights would always be upheld by American and British governments, and given a valuable lesson in the importance of property rights?

Perhaps the greatest tragedy thrown up by these 'what-ifs' is a real failure of ideas. I've already mentioned the flawed mercantilist thinking that empowered Britain's military misadventures -- an entanglement that cost Britain in both wealth and manpower, without any real gain. 

Perhaps the most important thing demonstrated by the whole tragedy of the Middle East  -- and the Mid-East's failure to ever really lift off is certainly a tragedy -- is the failure to properly communicate the ideas that underpin the freedom and prosperity of the west.   This is the real failure of the west with respect to the non-west.

YOU SEE, ALL THE countries of the Middle East at one time or another were confronted with the need to to shake off their superstitious pasts and to modernise their bad selves (to use the words of educator Maria Montessori, they developed a 'sensitive period' for learning about what made the west great); when confronted with the obvious military and economic superiority of the west all of them looked westward for inspiration  -- but what countries like Turkey and Egypt and eventually even Afghanistan saw when they realised their own backwardness and looked westward for inspiration was not the ideas of the likes of John Locke or Thomas Jefferson or Adam Smith -- the ideas that had underpinned the west's freedom and prosperity -- but instead the intellectual pygmies who then crawled across the intellectual wastelands of the late-nineteenth century who were then doing all they could to undercut freedom and prosperity altogether.

Instead of Carl Menger, Turkey's Kemal Atatutk picked up Karl Marx.  Instead of Frederic Bastiat, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser picked up Frederick Engels.   It's a powerful example of the necessity for good intellectual hygiene and of the power of even bad ideas -- that ideas can as easily destroy as make prosperous, depending on the particular ideas one picks up.  

Each Middle Eastern country modernised at a different time, each picking up the intellectual current of that time -- and unfortunately by the latter half of the nineteenth century when most were modernising, the intellectual current of the west was already fast dwindling to become a cesspool*.  The results in large part can still be seen today, with the secular shibboleths of collectivism and nationalism fighting the secular battle against the superstitious backwardness of Islam, and losing.

You see, the game of 'Historical What-If?'  is endlessly fascinating, and what I've said here has only just scratched the surface: I've only posed questions arising from the first few lectures of Scott Powell's Islamist Entanglement course. 

It's fascinating to speculate for example about what the whole Middle East would be like, hell, what  the whole world be like, if it had never been infected with the stinking collectivism of Marx and the nasty nationalism of the likes of Hegel and the German 'ethnic nationalists': if all the many millions slaughtered by the dictators of the twentieth century had been allowed to live, and if all the billions enslaved by totalitarian ideology had been allowed to live free.

JUST IMAGINE IF THE world hadn't been intellectually empowered to give power to those killers, "those depraved individuals who would rather kill than live, who would rather inflict pain and death than experience pleasure, whose pleasure comes from the infliction of pain and death. Unfortunately," observes George Reisman in his book Capitalism, "there is no lack of such individuals...

[and no shortage of] philosophical justification for [their] murders, such as the security of the State, the will of God, the achievement of Lebensraum,or the establishment of communism and a future classless society. Each of these alleged values supposedly justified the murder of living human beings. As the Communists were so fond of saying, “The end justifies the means.”

And with enablers like Hegel and Marx to  state the ends -- which amount to making one neck for one noose -- the killers were given power and the means by which to carry out their atrocities.  But "just imagine," as Reisman invites ...

In eras that are philosophically and culturally better than our own, [these killers] might even pass their entire lives quietly, in modest obscurity, causing harm to no one. In such a better era, Hitler might have passed his days as an obscure paperhanger, Himmler as a chicken farmer, and Eichmann as a factory worker or office clerk. Lenin would probably have been just a disgruntled intellectual,and Stalin perhaps an obscure cleric. But in the conditions of a collapse of rationality, frustrations and feelings of hatred and hostility rapidly multiply, while cool judgment, rational standards, and civilized behavior vanish. Monstrous ideologies appear and monsters in human form emerge alongside them, ready to put them into practice.

In short, the real lesson from even these few 'what-ifs' is the life-saving necessity for good intellectual hygiene.

How's yours? 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Thank goodness New Zealand was settled in 1840, when John Locke and Adam Smith were at least remembered, if not still admired.  The Treaty of Waitangi at least pays homage to the shadow of John Locke, which is really its chief and perhaps only boon. (And thank goodness that when Asian tigers like Hong Kong and Taiwan began to take off in the latter half of last century, they chose to ignore the then-fashionable intellectual fads of the west, and go for prosperity instead)

Free Radical #79: 'Brown-Nosing Te Qaeda'

                                      

Yes, that's the cover of the latest Free Radical, which will be going out to shops and subscribers from the end of this week.  Subscribe now to make sure your letterbox is included in the first mailout, and you get the earliest possible briefing on the issues that matter:

• What happened to One Law for All?  Why is John Boy cravenly brown-nosing a man who wanted to assassinate him?  What does that say about him? And what do a dead Italian Communist and a live Mexican gunman have to do with it all?  LINDSAY PERIGO, TREVOR LOUDON, PETER CRESSWELL, PHIL HOWISON & TIM WIKIRIWHI between them examine Waitangi collectivism, the objective threat and ideological links of Te Qaeda, and why this matters to you.  DON'T MISS OUT!  You'll be keeping this issue as a reference for a long time to come.
• And who wrote the strategy for the left's long march through the culture?  LINDSAY PERIGO has the answer, and a solution.
• How do you keep yourself afloat in the world's most recent financial crisis? The simple answer is understanding.  Recent articles in The Free Radical have warned about the economic downturn, explained how the counterfeit capital of the world's central banks are culpable, and pointed to real solutions. In this issue we have  all the literature that's fit to read to understand the mess, and keep yourself afloat.
• And what about those dark greens, and their claims that the environment is endangered - that we're "running out of resources"?   "Rubbish," say our writers.  It's not climate that's endangered, says Czech president VACLAV KLAUS, it's freedom!  Progress is good, not destructive, says GEORGE REISMAN -- economic freedom is the solution, not the problem, he proves.  Reisman utterly demolishes environmentalists' claims that we're running out of resources and shows that as long as we pursue wealth we never will, and OWEN McSHANE &  VINCENT GRAY dissect the background of those who insist we must.  The historical links will surprise you, and the weight of argument will floor you!

All this and much, much more, including the Belgian who gave fuel to the Nanny State, the Canadian who became a hero of free speech, the architect who combines art and business, the educationalists who have a lot to say sorry for, and the American who's been proclaimed as a hero of conservatism and who is shown to be anything but  -- all this plus film reviews, book reviews and all our usual and controversial columnists.

The world is in a mess, the long march through the culture by anti-reason, anti-life state worshippers is the root cause – and like every ‘Free Radical’ since issue number one, this one has the solution: in a nutshell, it’s reason and the freedom to use it.

DON"T MISS OUT!  Subscribe now to get your copy in your mailbox ... and give the gift of Free Radicals to a friend or three who need the rocket-fuelled intellectual ammunition within. 

del.icio.us Tags: Libertarianism,Objectivism,Politics

Czech president Vaclav Klaus spoke to a recent climate conference in NY about the threat to freedom from warmist hysteria:

A week ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at the Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech there, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: “Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical – the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality.” What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its currently strongest version, climate alarmism...

Read his whole speech here:  'From Climate Alarmism to Climate Realism.'

Sense and non-sense from would-be world leaders

Two comments from two sources this morning for your comparison, one from a politician more braindead than normal, and the other from a very unlikely source showing more sense on the global warming charade than from many so called science writers -- and certainly more sense than is coming out of Bali at present.

Here's the first comment, from Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee who, when asked whether the global warming threat was "overblown" gave an audience his ambitious energy plan:

I think we ought to be out there talking about ways to reduce energy consumption and waste. And we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is.

Free of energy consumption!  As someone said, that's like "chemical free food."  It's a pledge to repeal the Laws of Thermodynamics. It's not "bold," it's physically impossible.  Huckabee is now positioning himself as "the entropy candidate!"

Much more sense from ... the Pope.  Yes, the Pope.  He might have some unusual friends (including an imaginary one who he says is omnipotent), but he clearly has some good advisors:

The Pope condemns the climate change prophets of doom.
Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology. The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering. [Read on here.]

Perhaps the (German) Pope has been listening to Czech president Vaclav Klaus, who reminded reporters at the launch of the German translation of his new book recently that "freedom, not climate, is under threat":

"Also (threatened) is the prevailing social and economic order, contemporary civilisation, the current prosperity of developed countries and the chances of developing countries to achieve a similar level of prosperity." He said the climate change movement was not based on science and that theories about man-made global warming could not be proven. "It has become a new religion or new ideology and in that sense I think it's justified to compare it with other ideologies," Klaus said.

del.icio.us Tags: Global Warming,Politics-Europe,Politics-World

Consensus? What consensus?

Science is not a popularity contest. The success of a scientific theory is not judged by how many scientists support it (just ask Alfred Wegener, the scientist behind the theory of plate techtonics and continental drift which as Wikipedia notes was "widely ridiculed" in his day), but in how successfully it integrates the evidence and explains appropriate causal factors.

Nonetheless, we hear repeatedly that there is a scientific consensus on the existence of man-made global warming, defined as "humans having at least some effect on global climate change." History professor Naomi Oreskes' frequently cited and much argued about research on which this claim for consensus is based has recently been updated to reflect recent research, and Naomi (and headline writers) will be surprised at the results.

Using Oreske's own methodology, Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte examined all scientific papers published from 2004 (when Oreske's research was published) to February 2007:

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."

The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

These changing viewpoints represent the advances in climate science over the past decade. While today we are even more certain the earth is warming, we are less certain about the root causes. More importantly, research has shown us that -- whatever the cause may be -- the amount of warming is unlikely to cause any great calamity for mankind or the planet itself.

See: Survey: Fewer than Half of Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory - Daily Tech.

Weekend ramble, #15

Join me on another ramble through the more rational parts of the internet.

• Why do some countries drip health, wealth and happiness, and other places just suck. That's the very question PJ O'Rourke set out to answer in Eat the Rich, and Tim Harford continues to hunt out the answers. Here's Harford's report from "the armpit of Africa," a place with not shortage of either entrepreneurial spirit or investment or government, but desperately short of both wealth and what makes wealth possible: institutions that give long term time horizons to allow entrepreneurs and even governments to plan ahead. See Why Poor Countries are Poor - Tim Harford.
  
  UPDATE to this: Watching a film at Auckland's film festival yesterday, an ebullient entrepreneurial cinema impresario in Burkina Faso, one of the world's poorest countries, confided that the dream of he and his go-ahead colleagues was to be able to OWN their own cinema, giving them the necessary security to plan ahead. There's a saying in Africa, he said: "If you sleep on your own mat, then no one can take it away." In that saying is the importance of property rights explained, and in that story (and the lack of secure long-term time horizons) is the lack of wealth in Africa explained.
  
  
• And we all know that the mainstream media is awash with ignorance and hostility to capitalism, don't we? Notes Jeffrey Tucker, capitalism gets the blame even when all the capitalists have been murdered.
  

  Ever think that the anti-capitalism of the press is exaggerated or non-existent? Check out this incredible story at MSNBC/Newsweek. You would never know, never even guess, that China was the home to a murderous tyrant only a few decades ago (est. 40 million dead), and you would certainly never guess that China has gone from vast impoverishment to vast economic growth in record time, and certainly the relationship of this to capitalism is completely lost on the reporter. So here we go with the full-scale hysteria blaming the market for all of China's woes...

  Read Tucker's China Abandoned Communism and Deadly Chaos is the Result!
  
  
• Speaking of anti-capitalism, have you seen 'Sicko' yet, Michael Moore's latest encomium to a dictator? Says Ryan Balis, 'Sicko' Presents a False View of the Cuban Health Care Industry. Who would have thought, Michael Moore to presenting a "false view" to make a point -- you have to ask yourself, would he ever really have a point if he told the truth?
  
  
• Ever wanted to mail all the questions to which you wanted answers to a wise old philosopher? You're in luck. Dr Leonard Peikoff is in, and he's asking and answering questions at his website. Aristotelian sagacity at the click of the mouse.
  
  
• It might be mid-winter, but if your cat smells like last week's dishrag it's time to give him or her a wash. Bud Herron has some hilarious tips on how to go about the job without losing an arm.
  
  
• Everyone and his feminist great-aunt finds "phallic symbols" everywhere. But what about vagina symbols and those of us on the lookout for these? Why should vaginas miss out on all the action? The Sex or Not blog picks out a few examples and asks, "Vag, or not vag?"
  
  
• While we're talking art (or very nearly), those of you who've been following artist Michael Newberry's art mini-tutorials and aesthetic commentary linked here might find it useful to see all the commentary linked on one page here, and the mini-tutorials here.
  
  
• Stephen Hicks adds to the debate on good education (or the worldwide lack thereof) by asking about the divide between the humanities and the sciences and pointing out, "You can’t be an educated person without knowing some literature [or history], but when will we stop thinking of the scientifically illiterate as educated too? And what about the politically and economically illiterate? Bryan Caplan’s new book probes the issue of whether democracy is self-defeating."
  
  
• And here's Stephen being interviewed about post-modernism, what Nietzsche gave to the Nazis, and the joys and otherwise of being a philosophy professor. On postmodernism (on which his book Explaining Postmodernism is still the most pellucid) Hicks argues that the failure of Enlightenment philosophers to produce a viable theory of knowledge is what made post-modernism possible, and although "we are still living in the after-glow of modernist confidence and reason," this failure leaves reason and scientific enterprise philosophically undefended, and the field wide open for the cynical skepticism of the post-moderns. See The Post-modern Assault on Reason - Interview with Stephen Hicks.
  
  
• What should a rich man do with all his money if he really wants to "help others"? If he's Bill Gates, "the (second) richest man in the world who helped create a revolutionary computer software company, and earlier this month collected an honorary degree from Harvard University" you might wonder whether he really understands "the vital role wealth creation plays in society" if he thinks giving is money away is the best way to help. "By any reasonable calculation," says Robert Barro in the Wall Street Journal, "Microsoft
  has been a boon for society and the value of its software greatly exceeds the likely
  value of Mr. Gates's philanthropic efforts." True. With a walking engine of production like Bill, the most productive thing Bill could do for all of us is to keep using his money to produce more. See Bill Gates' Charitable Vistas - Robert Barro, Wall Street Journal.
  
  
• The reason for Islamic terrorism is not western foreign policy. Who says? A former member of the British Jihadi network. Says Hassan Butt,

  By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the ‘Blair’s bombs’ line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology. "
  

  Ed Hussain concurs, saying in a Telegraph article on the rise of middle class Islamic terrorism,
  

  [Blaming western foreign policy] is just an excuse. They reject Western culture full stop, not just 'slags in night clubs'. They would have supported the bombing of Muslims attending the cinema in Cairo in the 1950s. They do not want Muslims to enjoy social freedoms. If it was not Iraq they would cite Chechnya. Or Palestine. These are angry men. Accommodation is not an option. It has to be containment or annihilation.

  And says Tanveer Ahmed in Australia:

  What we now call extremism was virtually the norm in the community I grew up in. It was completely normal to view Jews as evil and responsible for the ills of the world. It was normal to see the liberal society around us as morally corrupt, its stains to be avoided at all costs. It was normal to see white girls as cheap and easy and to see the ideal of femininity as its antithesis. These views have been pushed to more private, personal spheres amid the present scrutiny of Muslim communities.

  Hat tip to Tim Blair and to Perry de Havilland at Samizdata, who points out to anyone who's still averting their eyes from the danger, "That is what makes these people so different from the IRA or ETA or any of the West's entirely indigenous terrorists: there can be no possible meeting of the minds or compromise or middle ground to be found with the current crop of Wahhabi inspired mass murderers. It really is them or us." As Brian Doherty summarises, "we are all self-indulgent libertine scum who deserve to die."
  
  
• Despite the models showing the atmosphere as the place where warming happens, the surface temperature record is what everyone points to in discussing global warming. Roger Pielke and Anthony Watts continue to research the actual quality of the reputed "high quality" surface temperature stations on which the surface temperature record relies. Here's the surface temperature station that was recording temperature in Fort Morgan, Colorado (a place for which no "urban heat island" effect will have been factored into any temperature adjustments) complete with a red brick building (great for storing and re-radiating the sun's warmth), silos full of fermenting sugar beets (with the heat products thereof), four air conditioners in close proximity, and as the man says, "in keeping with current observed trends, any weather station with air conditioning also needs close-by parking."
  
  The UK, Europe and NZ are seriously talking about reducing carbon emissions by fifty percent to stop "runaway global warming." Al Bore wants ninety percent. Comforting to know that it's stations such as this that produce the temperature record on whose basis the shackling and shut down of western industry is being contemplated.
  
  
• Is there a difference between the forecasts of the opinions of experts and scientific forecasting? "Yes!" say forecasting experts Scott Armstrong and Kesten Green, and the climate forecasts produced by the IPCC for the next hundred years fall into the former camp. "The forecasts in the [latest IPCC] Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they present the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing... We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts to support global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder." Read the article on these two here : Chorus Does Not Justify Climate Prophecies - Sydney Morning Herald.
  And their own paper of the IPCC's forecast here: Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists Versus Scientific Forecasts? - Armstrong and Green [pdf] [Hat tip Climate Audit]
  
  
• And have you found out your own "carbon footprint" using the Live Earth footprint calculator? My own is an embarrassingly small 0.75 tonnes of carbon per year, only ten percent of the average American, barely one percent of Al Bore's, and just 0.001 percent of the carbon produced by Al Bore's Live Earth.
  
  
• More on the morons of Live Earth here from the Sp!ked team. Says Rob Lyons, "The problem with the concerts was not Madge's massive footprint and other rock-star hypocrisy. It was the apocalyptic message of the sermons." Too true. With the magnitude of the problem the warmists claim we're facing -- global apocalypse; worldwide destruction; millions of climate refugees; extinction of species; running out of toilet paper -- it's remarkable just how wet was the pledge the warmists wanted the audience to make. It's almost like they don't really believe in their own apocalypse.
  
  
• By contrast the almost-always rational Czech president Vaclav Klaus points out that even by their own standards the "apocalypse that isn't" requires not enormous state intervention but intelligent adaptation, and in that the state can only get in the way. Human adaptation is not the province of either the state or of climatologists; it's carried out by individuals with the freedom to act, and can best be measured and assessed by economists. This question, he says, is "not the cup of tea of economists and representatives of other social sciences. These people ask very different questions (which is why they shouldn't be blamed for not being weather or climate experts). They are asking to what extent a particular phenomenon such as warming will be a problem, what its consequences will be, what will be the costs of adaptation, and perhaps what would be the costs of eliminating the phenomenon altogether. This is not a domain of natural sciences."

  Richard Posner... [suggested] ... it was necessary to do something about the climate because higher temperatures would lead to higher sea levels, by about two feet in 100 years (even though it is 0.5 - 1.3 feet according to the latest IPCC report) and that this would require a forced transfer of tens of millions of people. At first glance, this looks horrible. It is like moving several Czech Republics from one place to another.
  
  However, if we think for a while and consider these issues in their proper context, we realize that what we talk about is about 0.5 percent of the world population. We should immediately see that every year, much more than 0.5 percent of the world population is moving. But this relocation should occur not within one year but within one century: only one hundredth of the number cited above would be moving every year: five thousandths of a percent of the people of the world! This is a completely negligible number - but we could only see this fact by considering the context. [...]
  
  What should we choose? Should we believe the market (and its ethics) or ethics of the prophets of global warming? I would prefer to believe the free market (and its interest rate) more than the elitists from the rich and developed world ...
  
  The debate about this issue must continue. But this debate is unrelated to measurements of temperatures and it is only marginally related to the causes of these changes.

  Read Klaus in translation at Lubos' Reference Frame: Vaclav Klaus: Climatologists & Economists.
  
  
• Speaking of fashionable nonsense, local contrarian and property investor Bob Jones has slammed the Green Building fad as "a fashionable inanity," saying the movement is an over-reaction by "conservative dullards."

  The movement - which looks at and rates the environmental impact of a building and the activity that surrounds it - is gaining popularity, but Sir Robert said he doubted it would last. "I'm picking this to last about four years with the private sector and a decade with the government," he said.

  See Property Tycoon Jones Slams Green Inanity.
  
  
• And the fashionable nonsense continues with the contradictorily name "Smart Growth," a movement started in Portland Oregon that severely restricts growth and is definitely not smart (but neither is it "green"), but which has nonetheless infested the western world and raised house prices in every city in which planners have been allowed to introduce it. As PM of NZ says sagaciously, Portland Oregon itself is now "a world class example of how not to plan." He backs this up with a Cato Institute report Debunking Portland: The City That Doesn't Work.
  
  
• In the face of the Green Juggernaut, Nick Provenzo suggests it's time to resurrect the Capitalism Center's Campaign in Defence of Industry and Technology. Any takers?
  
  
• 
• Two tales of freedom are compared by Juliusz Jablecki: JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

  Both Rand and Tolkien passionately tell their tales about freedom ... but they resort to completely different aesthetics, and, in consequence, paint two entirely different pictures of the world, with different heroes and different challenges. Are those differences important? How do they affect the "moral" of the respective tales? Given that it is of utmost importance just what kind of story one tells, it is perhaps worthwhile to reflect upon the different world images depicted in Atlas Shrugged and The Lord of the Rings, comparing the characters of both narratives along with the predicaments they face.

  Personally, I'd prefer to see Wagner's Ring and Atlas Shrugged compared, but as yet that study has barely begun. In the meantime, see Tales of Titans & Hobbits - Juliusz Jablecki.
  
  
• Speaking of tales of freedom, I saw the deservedly award-winning film Lives of Others the other night, a tale of late-Communist East Berlin when one-third of East Germany was spying on the other two-thirds, and on each other. Magnificent drama, for which John Podhoretz has an equally magnificent review (warning, contains spoilers). For myself, I was struck by the character of Wiesel [sp?], the repressed Stasi spy in this last-days-of-Ccommunism drama, and I contrasted him with the character of Andrei Taganov in Ayn Rand's We the Living, a novel describing the first bloody outpourings of Bolshevik takeover.
  
  Together We the Living and Lives of Others act as bookends to the Communist era, and the characters of Taganov and Weisel act like a graph measuring the fate and character of the communist system's own best and brightest over the seventy years of Communist hegemony. Taganov was the best the revolution could produce in the early days, and he died of it. Here's a discussion between Bolshevik Taganov, and the individualist heroine, Kira We the Living that presages those seventy years and the world produced by Taganov's revolution.
  

  [Andrei:] "I know what you're going to say. You're going to say, as so many of our enemies do, that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods."
  [Kira:] "I loathe your ideals."
  "Why?"
  "For one reason, mainly, chiefly, and eternally, no matter how much your Party promises to accomplish, no matter what paradise it plans to bring mankind. Whatever your other claims may be, there's one you can't avoid, one that will turn your paradise into the most unspeakable hell: your claim that man must live for the state."
  "What better purpose can he live for?"
  "Don't you know," her voice trembled suddenly in a passionate plea she could not hide," don't you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: 'This is mine'? Don't you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don't you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of millions?"
  He answered: "No."
  "Comrade Taganov," she whispered, "how much you have to learn!" More here.

  Weisel was what became of good men under the system seventy years later in the crumbling end days of that revolution. Small, repressed, poisonous, but still within him the honesty that made him capable of an act that transformed lives, and presaged the fall of The Wall. I highly recommend the film, with Rand's novel (or the sometimes muddled, sometimes magnificent film of the book) as a necessary bookend.
  
• And finally, it's Bastille Day, so here's some Django Reinhardt at You Tube. Balm for the soul. And here's the Marseillaise, one of the world's great anthems, sung as an act of resistance in the great anti-Nazi scene from Casablanca. Allez les Bleu!
  

A new Free Radical, and a FREE offer ...

The new Free Radical magazine is out and this issue has lessons for most, good reading for all... and a special free offer that should have everyone happy. Read on.

When the Berlin Wall fell it was obvious to everyone with eyes to see and a brain to think with that socialism had been tried, and it had failed spectacularly. No one alive at the time could fail to get the lesson: Socialism Sucks.

But it seems lessons that big have to be relearned every generation: the tragedy of Venezuela should be this generation’s object lesson that Socialism Sucks.

Socialism came to Venezuela, and in its inevitable wake has come poverty, penury and oppressive totalitarian rule. This issue of The Free Radical sends out A Challenge to Young Socialists to watch, and to learn – and to reject this ideological harbinger of misery.

Let freedom reign! Let freedom reign in boardrooms, bedrooms and smoko rooms. We talk to NZ Green MP Metiria Turei who wants to let freedom reign in New Zealand’s hospital treatment rooms, allowing medical practitioners to prescribe a drug that, as Jonothan Rennie's History of Medical Marijuana points out, was once used by Queen Victoria – a drug that Lancet has confirmed is less harmful than either alcohol or tobacco.

There’s much, much more in this issue:

• Frank Shostak and Lary Sechrest explain how economic illiterates and central banks make us poor;


• Lindsay Perigo and Muriel Newman lament the rise and rise and rise of Nanny State - as Perigo describes her, that disgusting "hybrid of gargoyle and dominatrix";


• George Reisman on how the thricefold seductions of socialism, environmentalism and irrational skepticism (but surely I repeat myself) are fuelled by irrational education;


• we have an obituary for the New Zealand woman who’s left several generations of students around the world functionally illiterate;


• an interview with the man to whose gun shop knife-wielding would-be suicide victims seem to be drawn;


• dissidence from "a dissident president";


• global warming sense from another president - "environmental extremism is the modern equivalent of communism," says Czech president Vaclav Klaus;


• confessions of a former warmist who threw himself off the global warming gravy train;

advice for parents from Larry Sechrest and Tia Wooller: Don't fake reality;

• an obituary for a philosopher whose own grip on reality was slight. He died, we think;


• reviews of conman Conrad Black's eulogy to "champion of freedom" Franklin Roosevelt, Al Gore's upfront assault on reason and the internet, and Stephen Hicks' exegesis of Nietzsche and the Nazis;

… all this and much more in this latest issue including new and regular columnists to challenge your funnybone and your thinking, and great scads of The Free Radical's usual brand of irreverent wit.

I invite you to step inside Free Radical 76: Politics, Economics & Life As If Freedom Mattered, and load up on intellectual ammunition!

Subscribe here.


Download a digital copy here.

Buy your hard copy (NZ only) from one of these quality outlets.

But that's not all. We're so confident of the quality of each and every copy of The Free Radical that this month we're throwing open our digital back issues. That's right: All digital back issues of The Free Radical are free! See below for links.

We're convinced that once you see the quality of our back issues, you won't want to miss out on getting your NEW copy of the Free Radical in your letterbox hot off the press.

Enjoy!

Cheers, Peter Cresswell

EDITOR, THE FREE RADICAL
PC.Blogspot.Com

DIGITAL FREE RADICAL BACK ISSUES -- all free to good homes:
FREE RADICAL 75: The Naked Truth About Self-Defence
FREE RADICAL 74: The Environmental Noose is Tightening!
FREE RADICAL 73: The Assault on Free Speech
FREE RADICAL 72: The Great Environmental Sellout
FREE RADICAL 71: The Stolen Election!

UPDATE: I've just been told that subs were mailed this morning (including everyone who's subscribed online this week) and shops should have their copies Monday. :-)

Global warming: Truth or propaganda?

On that question in the heading above, Czech president Vaclav Klaus argued vigorously for the latter in last week's Financial Times. "Ambitious environmentalism," he said, "is the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity... What is at risk is not the climate, but freedom."

Naturally, that forthright position attracted some response. In today's Financial Times Klaus anwers those responses -- and damn, he's good.

A weekend ramble through religion, history, illiteracy and Wikipedia... and more. Enjoy!

Another Saturday morning ramble through links, sites and titbits that caught my eye over the last week as I waded through the interweb.

• The US Center for Public Policy Research is turning Greenpeace's insistence on climate skeptic organisations revealing their funding back on Greenpeace, "challenging Greenpeace and its affiliates to disclose the sources and amounts of its 2006 donations exceeding $50,000," and revealing some of those donors.
  

  Greenpeace - perhaps based on its own behavior - assumes that donations influence the stands groups such as ours take. They do not. So that the public can judge for themselves, we're challenging Greenpeace to complete transparency through disclosure of major gifts... If Greenpeace expects its call for public disclosure of grants of other groups to be taken seriously, they should lead by example. If not, they're the real "denial industry."

  If Greenpeace agrees, says The Center, then they will do the same. See Think Tank Challenges Greenpeace to Meet Transparency Standards.
  
  
• John Stossel makes a point, which as usual is a point worth making:

  Whenever someone is hurt in an accident, people say, "There ought to be a law!" Politicians rush to oblige them and then take credit for all the lives they saved. But shouldn't they also accept blame for the lives lost because of those laws?

  Lives lost? Yes. A joint study by the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute found that government regulations that are supposed to save lives actually end up killing more people. Why? Because safety laws almost always have unintended bad consequences.

  See John Stossel: Hazardous Safety Regulation.
  
  
• Hate Crime. Ed Cline has the real oil on so called "hate crimes," and here's the nub:

  The first and most crucial thing to grasp about what can be deemed a “hate crime” is that it is, essentially, a political crime.

  He's right you know. Read Ed Cline: The Genesis of Thought Crime.
  
  
• And read Ed too on Jamestown -- the first successful American colonial outpost -- and Why Jamestown Matters,.a letter correcting a politically correct account of the colony that appeared in a national newspaper. As you'll see, Ed's account has relevance both to New Zealand colonisation, and to recent arguments about politics and religion. Historian Eric Daniels fleshes out Ed's response in a more detailed exposition of the Jamestown colony. Jamestown, he says, was The Birthplace of America's Distinctive, Secular Ideal.
  
  
• David Bain is the new David Beckham, or so you would think from all the media coverage he's received this week. When will he be on Dancing With the Stars? Notes the Kiwi Pundit,

  The 'miscarriage of justice' referred to in the [Privy Council] decision is not that the verdict was likely to be wrong. The point is that justice requires that the defendant be convicted by a jury that has seen all the evidence. The Bain jury didn't see all the evidence, therefore there is a miscarriage of justice. There is no inference that the jury would have, or should have, decided the case differently based on the new evidence.

  It's too easy to forget that David Bain is still a suspect -- one of only two suspects in a multiple murder -- and as such he needs a proper trial to either clear his name or determine his guilt. Guilt in this case should be easier to prove than in many other cases, since there are only two suspects, and for the other one to have "done it," then you have to be able to show that he subsequently suicided -- a difficult job by all accounts. Meanwhile, Falufulu Fisi reminds us of the leading evidence against David Bain in this comment.
  
  
• Increasing illiteracy is not unique to the products of NZ's factory schools -- it's a worldwide failure due to the signal failure of a leading literacy theory, the stupid "whole language" method of not teaching reading -- a method that "teaches children to memorize and guess at words, using pictures and other clues, instead of using phonics skills to sound them out." It's worth reminding ourselves that "the experts" responsible for this abject failure still rule the roost at the world's teachers' colleges, pumping out new teachers to teach illiteracy to new generations of students every year.
  
  Martha Brown names names in this article, pointing out some of those responsible for both introducing and maintaining a method of teaching that has ensured that in New Zealand a staggering 66.4 percent of Mäori were below the minimum level of “ability to understand and use information from text,”and an equally tragic 41.6 percent of non-Mäori, and "that the United States, like Haiti, is among the seven out of 39 Western Hemisphere nations entering the third millennium with a literacy rate below 80 percent."
  
  Why do we face this elementary problem? Read Brown's Poor Reading-Instruction Methods Keep Many Students Illiterate to begin finding out, and to see what part "NZ's own" Marie Clay has to play in the whole scam. Have a look at this local page for a brief introduction to the difference between whole word, whole language and phonics, and read some of Patrick Goff's articles at this index to get some of idea of how phonics really does works for reading. Brown's conclusion is worth quoting in full. Explaining why Marie Clay's Reading Recovery programme still continues despite both research and practical experience of failure that discredits it, she concludes:

  Writing separately, [literacy researchers] Groff and Lyon both speak of poor teacher preparation and (in Lyon's words) of "the tendency for educational practices and policies to be guided by philosophical and ideological factors rather than scientific factors." Groff notes educators' ignorance and distrust of "what experimental research actually indicates about reading instruction."
  
  He adds, "There has been no easy or regular accommodation for grievances from the courts for the malpractice in reading instruction that has taken place. The monopoly over teacher education that is now held by university departments of education has allowed them to train reading teachers wrongly with impunity. Ideology about reading teaching thrives in this hothouse of irrationality."

  Burning down the teachers' colleges is long overdue.
  

• While Syrian and Iranian sponsored terrorists are blowing up people in Iraq and Israel, Condoleeza Rice looked the other way and went to the Middle East to talk to those who train, arm and supply the terrorists. What did she think she was doing? According to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute,

  Talking will not convince the Iranian theocrats to give up their support for terrorism and their feverish quest for nuclear weapons. Quite to the contrary, any such 'dialogue' will only demonstrate America's weakness and encourage the Iranians to sponsor even more terrorism, especially against Americans in Iraq.

  He's right, isn't he. When one side is saying "Death to America!" and America responds by "seeking dialogue," aren't you just inviting more of the same? See Yaron Brook: Iran Sponsors Terrorism, US Seeks Dialogue.

• In fact, when it comes to the threat of Islamic Totalitarianism, as John Lewis says There is No Substitute For Victory. Hear Lewis make the argument in a controversial presentation at George Mason University: a link page is here. (And here, just to remind you, is his fantastic article on the same topic.)
  
  
• But surely the threat of Islamic Totalitarianism isn't a real threat, I hear some of you say? This isn't a real war? Well, perhaps you need to understand a different way to declare war. In the modern world with only one major superpower, there is more than one way to declare war. James Joyner lays out in detail the reality of so-called Fourth Generation War, a new kind of war in which we are presently engaged, and which is as difficult to fight as it is for many people to identify.
  

  We now face a foe that cannot be defeated with a few guided missiles, smart bombs, or shock and awe. We’re not simply fighting “terror” or “terrorists,” but, as Barnett puts it, “those who want to isolate large chunks of humanity.” These people are, quite literally, enemies of freedom and of its underlying values. The global economy, its rules, and its attendant culture threaten their way of life, and they will stop at nothing to cut themselves off from the reach of Western values.

  The good news is that this enemy doesn’t have the ability that the Soviet Union had to wipe out the planet. The bad news is that this enemy may be harder to defeat. And remember: the Cold War lasted more than forty years.

• But isn't it easier to just put your head in the sand about the threat and just blame others for imagined vices? Well, maybe. It's certainly something that's going around. In fact, there's even a leading psychiatrist who's identified it as a syndrome. University of Michigan psychiatrist Pat Santy suggests that the phenomenon of "displacement" is at work.

  Displacement is the separation of an emotion from its real object and its redirection toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid having to deal directly with what is frightening or threatening...
  [
  This pyschological manouever disguises obvious self-delusion or self-deception]: It is, for example, behind most of the more vicious attacks on President Bush for anything he does; and for anything he doesn't do. He is behind every evil like some modern-day Moriarity, a criminal and godlike genius who is simultaneously a moron and incompetent. We are not talking about a mere dislike of the President; nor is this simply "politics as usual". Rather, it is an unreasoning and implacable, visceral hatred of George W. Bush for the sin of existing.
  

  Visit "Dr Sanity" here: More Displacement, Less Reality. [Hat tip Orson at SOLO]
  
  
• Meanwhile, Lubos Motl at The Reference Frame has news of what looks to be a fabulous book by Czech president Vaclav Klaus, Blue , Not Green Planet -- including a great interview and reaction from climatologists. Klaus views the environmental movement and specifically the global warming hysteria as a Green "revolt of mobs." From the interview (translated from the Czech):

  Could you please tell our readers who obviously haven't yet read your book why you wrote it?
  Because I am very worried about some people's far-reaching attempts to reconstruct the world and revolutionize the behavior of the society. These people use some highly questionable data and hypotheses to deduce what is happening today and what will be happening in the world. And I view it as a threat for freedom... this issue has the capacity to mobilize larger groups of people: that's why I say that environmentalists are able to initiate a "revolt of the mobs".
  
  This topic is likeable and understandable for most people. Catastrophes are always sold well and the extrapolated catastrophicity is now even higher than it used to be in the context of Marx. I don't think that the goal of these people is to reduce freedom deliberately. When I am going to talk to Al Gore, he will deny it. But I insist that what he proposes does suppress freedom. And it is sad he is not thinking about the consequences.
  

• I've just discovered and enjoyed a 2005 speech from Alan Greenspan, a quick walk through American economic history of the last two-hundred years, concluding with hs view of the health and resilience of the contemporary economy, which is changed fundamentally he argues by the ability of crucially important price signals to be disseminated so rapidly by your new information systems, and by a new flexibility in the economic system. It's worth quoting a substantial part of it since it explains the value of economic freedom so succinctly:
  

  Whether by intention or by happenstance, many, if not most, governments in recent decades have been relying more and more on the forces of the marketplace and reducing their intervention in market outcomes. We appear to be revisiting Adam Smith's notion that the more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct after inevitable, often unanticipated disturbances. That greater tendency toward self-correction has made the cyclical stability of the economy less dependent on the actions of macroeconomic policymakers, whose responses often have come too late or have been misguided.

  It is important to remember that most adjustment of a market imbalance is well under way before the imbalance becomes widely identified as a problem. Individual prices, exchange rates, and interest rates, adjust incrementally in real time to restore balance. In contrast, administrative or policy actions that await clear evidence of imbalance are of necessity late.

  Being able to rely on markets to do the heavy lifting of adjustment is an exceptionally valuable policy asset. The impressive performance of the U.S. economy over the past couple of decades, despite shocks that in the past would have surely produced marked economic contraction, offers the clearest evidence of the benefits of increased market flexibility....
  Most recently, the flexibility of our market-driven economy has allowed us, thus far, to weather reasonably well the steep rise in spot and futures prices for oil and natural gas that we have experienced over the past two years. The consequence has been a far more stable economy.

  Flexibility is most readily achieved by fostering an environment of maximum competition. A key element in creating this environment is flexible labor markets. Many working people, regrettably, equate labor market flexibility with job insecurity.

  Despite that perception, flexible labor policies appear to promote job creation, not destroy it...Although the business cycle has not disappeared, flexibility has made the economy more resilient to shocks and more stable overall during the past couple of decades.

  Read the whole speech, starting here: Alan Greenspan speech, Oct 12, 2005.
  
  
• As many readers will know, Alan Greenspan was an enthusiastic admirer of Ayn Rand. Which links nicely to this post at the Leitmotif blog, answering this question: Why is Ayn Rand Respected More in India?

  Ayn Rand is rather well-known in India, though of course not as widely known as she is in the US; however, it can be argued that Rand is certainly viewed more respectfully and with admiration here in India than in the US.

  The reasons for that are probably not quite straightforward: it’s not just because Rand’s reputation in India has escaped the lies, mischaracterizations, and attacks of the intellectual and academic elite in the US...
  

  And one might say the same of the lies, mischaracterisations, and attacks of the intellectual and academic elite here in New Zealand. One might, but one wouldn't.

  In my opinion, the main reason for this is that the Indian people who read her actually understand the truth of her arguments, for the most part. Because Indians live in the collectivist, pseudo-statist, tradition-bound, mystic society that India is, the readers grasp the validity of Rand’s ferocious criticisms of these states and agree with her description of life under these conditions.

• Speaking of Rand, if you've never seen her sparkling appearances on the Phil Donahue Show in the last decade of her life, then you should. YouTube has them, starting here: Ayn Rand - Donahue Interview (Part 1).
  
  
• "Powdergate." Like a zombie emerging from our dark pre-1984 past, the recent trial of business executives for selling milk powder -- a product over which the government had decreed that the Dairy Board should hold a monopoly -- serves as a reminder that the gains and economic freedoms so well addressed in Alan Greenspan's speech above should not be taken for granted. Our Muldoonist past is not so far away.
  

• What about them Scientologists, huh? Yeah, they're fruit cakes for sure, but Alexander Cockburn argues they're no more nuts than are most religious fruitcakes.

  There’s probably more psychic oppression in every ten seconds of the life of the Roman Catholic Church (or — let’s be ecumenical — the Mormons, Lutherans, Baptists and Methodists) than in the career of the Scientologists since L. Ron Hubbard got them launched. Last time I heard, the Vatican (which has to OK every deal) was settling sex abuse cases against priests in the U.S. at about $1 million per.

  He points to the dangers of the political demonisation of religionists. (Think Exclusive Brethren.) See Alexander Cockburn: Scientologists Take Offense in Reich Land. As always, this blog will continue to personally demonise religionists insead.
  

• "Why is it okay to make fun of Christians but not Muslims?" asks Jim Woods. Well, he says for a start, "every adult that talks to their imaginary friends are either a prime candidate to be the object of humor, or institutionalized if they are a direct physical danger to themselves or others. "

  This includes Muslims, Christians, and all other devoted followers of the Invisible Sky Daddy. Fortunately, it generally isn’t necessary to make the effort to make up jokes about them as they do that themselves when they open their mouths.

  Making fun of people who actually respond verbally to your ribbing is always far more fun than making fun of people who blow up your transport.

  In addition, especially outside of this country, Muslims live in cultures where Aristotle is now completely absent. To find something similar in this country you would have to go to a Protestant church or a university faculty lounge. No wonder they act illogically, they don’t even know that logic was invented. Humor would go right over their heads; non-contradiction, what is that?

• The danger of mixing politics and religion is highlighted over at Thrutch, with a post on the worrying rise of religiopolitics in Europe, and news of a limited atheist fight back.

  Passive indifference to faith has left Europe's churches mostly empty. But debate over religion is more intense and strident than it has been in many decades. Religion is re-emerging as a big issue in part because of anxiety over Europe's growing and restive Muslim populations and a fear that faith is reasserting itself in politics and public policy...
  
  ..."The battle over religion is restarting. It is going to be a difficult one," says Terry Sanderson, president of Britain's National Secular Society... The most potent force driving activist atheism is concern that Islam, Europe's fastest-growing religion, is jeopardizing the principles of the Enlightenment -- and emboldening other religions to raise their voices, too, and re-fight old battles... Such faith-based agitation, says [University of London professor Anthony] Grayling, threatens a "dark ages for free enquiry and free speech."

  See Theocracy Watch: The Re-emergence of Religion in Europe.
  
  
• Some of you might have seen the recent issue of Time magazine which baldly stated as fact many myths about global warming that your average tin foil hat wearer would reject as too outlandish, including for example the bald claim about so-called "climate refugees," people -- "about 25 million" -- displaced by global warming-induced disasters, "such as those in the Papua New Guinean Carteret Islands, who have been forced to relocate due to a rising ocean level." Trouble is, that's just not true. It's just as untrue as a similar claim in Al Bore's film about "climate refugees" flooding into NZ (have you seen them?). The problem in the Pacific, such as it is, is not rising sea levels but sinking islands.
  
  
• And finally, if surgery was like Wikipedia, here's how little surgery would get done. Hilarious!.
  

Enjoy your weekend!